We aren't talking about the Singularity since we aren't talking about machine intelligence created by man which surpasses our own intelligence. People seem to think making a copy of human intelligence is what the singularity is about it's not. It's about Skynet. It's about Colossus from the Forbin Project. It's about use creating sentient intelligent machines.

You can't separate the two. the moment you load a human intelligence into a machine, it is a machine intelligence, and meets the criteria. It's silly to even try and differentiate those points.

You all seem to be inferring something that should not be inferred. 'Singularity' only speaks to the advent of "super-intelligence", not the mechanism by which it is attained. It might be attained through GMO techniques, cyber-neural melding (read any Iain Banks novel), or through something resembling "personality transference" as you suggest (see Old Man's War by John Scalzi). It's even possible (likely?) that we could reach the singularity by pure accident (a seriously disruptive technology).

One of the problems with all of this is nobody's bothered to define exactly what 'super-intelligence' even looks like. What would a super-intelligent being be capable of that a mere human would not? Play chess better? That would qualify it seems to me, although weakly.

Clarke's law seems to apply here (except in reverse): If the technology seems magical, it must be sufficiently advanced. In my mind, grandmaster-level chessplay is already magical...

Well, one could argue that a 'super-intelligent' being would be confused to be a deity or a god by less intelligent beings. They would also have the technology/skills to perform actions that would be confused with miracles/magic.

There have been prototypes for similar vehicles from the early post-War era until now; as was mentioned, there's no physical barrier to making a flying car and it's been done repeatedly. But they're still too expensive, too energy inefficient, too hard to fly, too hard to coordinate in the airspace, too noisy, etc... for mass-market adoption. What breakthrough have the latest models made which solve all of these problems? None! Maybe we will have flying cars in our garages some day, but it sure as hell won't be any time soon. Ideas are cheap--it's the long hard incremental slog to feasibility which is the real progress.

Why spend $150 billion? Head down to your local bookstore and you'll find several Micheal Chrichton or Dean Koontz books on this.

Don't look at those hacks for sci-fi. If you want singularity fiction check out Charles Stross and Vernor Vinge.

Obviously. I don't think anyone considers them (Koontz in particular) sci-fi authors. But sci-fi is not the only genre that could address the subject. I believe Chrichton in particular would have treated the subject well, regardless what genre you want to stick him in.

Seeing as how Crichton was a M.D. (Graduated from Harvard Medical School 1969) I'd say he had the chops to pursue the idea of the Singularity from a medical perspective. Although he never practiced medicine he spent his life remaining up to date on current thought surrounding the human condition.

Proponents of the idea of the Singularity seem to have mistaken metaphor/analogy for reality.

When you upload, download or "move" a file, you aren't actually moving a file around. You are creating copies.

Similarly, even if we create machines which are capable of storing and continuing to execute human consciousness, and you "move" or "upload" your consciousness into that machine, it will be a copy of your consciousness. It won't be you. You will still die.

EDIT:

With regards to the likelihood of creating machines that can even simulate human consciousness (let alone execute a copy of one, which is its own challenge), I don't think it's likely until we've cracked quantum computing. I buy the proposal that our brains are quantum computers, and I have begun to think that they cannot be accurately simulated on current hardware.

We cease to be who we were all the time had a bleeding type stroke (CVA) a couple years ago, the near lightswitch changes in thought processes & structurefrom before the CVA, after it during recovery, and a few months later after I'd recovered enough to live a normal life gave me some very different outlooks on life. But also, it allowed me to look back & recognize changes in thinking patterns I had in the past over time (i.e. growing up). did you die because3 you quit being a child & grew up?

We aren't talking about the Singularity since we aren't talking about machine intelligence created by man which surpasses our own intelligence. People seem to think making a copy of human intelligence is what the singularity is about it's not. It's about Skynet. It's about Colossus from the Forbin Project. It's about use creating sentient intelligent machines.

You can't separate the two. the moment you load a human intelligence into a machine, it is a machine intelligence, and meets the criteria. It's silly to even try and differentiate those points.

Wrong. You clearly don't understand what the Singularity is about. It's about AI becoming sentient and surpassing its creator. It's not about humans trying to figure out a way to cheat death. It's about our own creation surpassing us.

And for those thinking we're hitting fundamental physics issues on the computing side, look up neuromorphic chips and engineering. Both DARPA and Intel have made advances down this path that are yielding excellent results. We're early on down that path, but the results are already very interesting.

This makes me think of Ghost in the Shell. I would have to say, though, that I think an AI emerging from the chaos of the 'Net would be more likely in the long run than people truly being able to upload their consciousness.

We aren't talking about the Singularity since we aren't talking about machine intelligence created by man which surpasses our own intelligence. People seem to think making a copy of human intelligence is what the singularity is about it's not. It's about Skynet. It's about Colossus from the Forbin Project. It's about use creating sentient intelligent machines.

You can't separate the two. the moment you load a human intelligence into a machine, it is a machine intelligence, and meets the criteria. It's silly to even try and differentiate those points.

Wrong. You clearly don't understand what the Singularity is about. It's about AI becoming sentient and surpassing its creator. It's not about humans trying to figure out a way to cheat death. It's about our own creation surpassing us.

And I'm saying it's silly to separate intelligence in a machine. Who cares where the consciousness came from. If it's in a machine, it counts.

Hell, Vernor Vinge practically coined the term, and he posited that using mind/machine interfaces to download the human mind could be one of the cuases of singularity. If we go further, von Neumann spoke of it as simply as the acceleration of technology fundamentally changing human life to something unrecognizable. His definition doesn't even speak of AI.

Proponents of the idea of the Singularity seem to have mistaken metaphor/analogy for reality.

When you upload, download or "move" a file, you aren't actually moving a file around. You are creating copies.

Similarly, even if we create machines which are capable of storing and continuing to execute human consciousness, and you "move" or "upload" your consciousness into that machine, it will be a copy of your consciousness. It won't be you. You will still die.

EDIT:

With regards to the likelihood of creating machines that can even simulate human consciousness (let alone execute a copy of one, which is its own challenge), I don't think it's likely until we've cracked quantum computing. I buy the proposal that our brains are quantum computers, and I have begun to think that they cannot be accurately simulated on current hardware.

This is something I don't think many people get. The best illustration of this is in an episode of a scifi anthology series, The Outer Limits maybe, where aliens gave humanity teleportation technology to allow us to cross the vast distances in space easily. What the public was never told is that the device isn't true teleportation. It didn't transport anyone anywhere. What it did was make an exact copy of a person at the other end. The original was killed and the copy allowed to go on oblivious to the fact that they are a copy. We have no idea what consciousness is so we have no idea if it can even be moved around from ody to body let alone replicated.

I've always felt "true teleportation" is beyond possible, but that this is what could eventually be achievable.. woulnd't you die the instant your body dissembled and then you'd need to be reanimated upon assembly at the other end? at least that has been my line of thinking and answer whenever anyone wished we could just teleport somewhere while traveling..

I think that uploading our brain information to a robot body that has the ability to process that information in a very similar way as our brain does seems very hard, and very far away. But I believe that we will be able to make a backup of our brain in our lifetime, and that cloning human bodies won't be far away, giving us something very similar to the singularity.

are you just describing the plot to the Arnold Swarzenager (sp?) movie The 6th Day or did you come to this independent of having experienced that awesomeness?

When you upload, download or "move" a file, you aren't actually moving a file around. You are creating copies.

Technically, you're correct, but its not as straightforward as you think. For example, take C++11's move semantics, which uses nothing more than pointer swapping to give the appearance that the object has been moved.

Perhaps, one day, we'll find a similar trick to the universe so we can create the appearance of an object having been moved instantaneously, when in fact it has not moved at all.

This makes me think of Ghost in the Shell. I would have to say, though, that I think an AI emerging from the chaos of the 'Net would be more likely in the long run than people truly being able to upload their consciousness.

Sentient AI doesn't just happen. You have to design it. What is intelligence? the ability to problem solve. What makes us sentient? We haven't a clue. It's not the amount of info we have in our heads. No one knows what makes us sentient. Some researchers think it has to do with the layout of our neural network.

You realize flying cars have been "in the queue" or "5 years away" for 30 years right?

Rationally minded people have always realized that flying cars aren't going to happen because there's too much additional complexity when you're talking about flying vs. driving on the ground.

It's arguable that flying cars DO exist, just not in the form of cars. They're called affordable small aircraft.

I disagree at least partially. The vehicles have always been possible Aerocar also Terrafugia and do exist what keeps it from being a reality is the FAA (in the US) and of course as has been stated there is no current system to handle the additional traffic this would put into the air or handle non pilots piloting a craft in the air.

Those issues have been addressed (auto take off and landing and autopilot controlled by on the ground systems) and are possible but expensive. Currently I think I'd rather see the government spend less money not more so this will have to wait till some private entity finds a way to make this a money maker.

This makes me think of Ghost in the Shell. I would have to say, though, that I think an AI emerging from the chaos of the 'Net would be more likely in the long run than people truly being able to upload their consciousness.

I was thinking "Gits" too. Especially "Human Error Processor" and "Man Machine Interface".Fascinating stuff. And scary. I would not like to be hacked or brainjacked.

With regards to the likelihood of creating machines that can even simulate human consciousness (let alone execute a copy of one, which is its own challenge), I don't think it's likely until we've cracked quantum computing. I buy the proposal that our brains are quantum computers, and I have begun to think that they cannot be accurately simulated on current hardware.

I couldn't disagree more.Why do people think we're so special? We're not. Evolution made a lot of compromises to get to where we are now. It only took about a million years to separate the human brain to the chimp one. Think about that. (in evolutionary time, it's not that much)Mind you, it was never evolution's goal to make humans that were good at math. That was just probably a byproduct of being good hunters.

Also, just because we don't know what consciousness is now, it doesn't mean it's that special. And besides, we don't have to invent it, we can just reverse engineer our own. We've already simulated a human brain, well ahead of predictions: (i think the original prediction was 2020)

We are far from being quantum computers in my opinion, the computational power per square inch in physics be much higher than it is in our brain. Evolution is not as good as it can be, it never has been. Evolution's goal is simply to be "just good enough" for survival. For proof of that all you have to do is look around you and see the all the species besides ours that didn't get smart, this also includes all the extinct species by the way.

When you upload, download or "move" a file, you aren't actually moving a file around. You are creating copies.

Technically, you're correct, but its not as straightforward as you think. For example, take C++11's move semantics, which is nothing more than pointer swapping.

Actually, when you upload a file you are simply making a copy. Same as simply putting a B&W sheet of text in a copy machine and hitting copy.

Yes, that is true when you are moving things between machines. However, if you're just moving within the same RAM space, you can just swap the pointers and invalidate the old one. This gives the appearance that the location of the object has changed, without having to copy anything (aside from the pointer, which is presumably much smaller than the object).

There are also cluster computing frameworks that provide for pointer-like objects even over a network, so the same concept would also apply. In other words, when YOU upload something right now, its a copy operation, but that doesn't mean it has to be.

Proponents of the idea of the Singularity seem to have mistaken metaphor/analogy for reality.

When you upload, download or "move" a file, you aren't actually moving a file around. You are creating copies.

Similarly, even if we create machines which are capable of storing and continuing to execute human consciousness, and you "move" or "upload" your consciousness into that machine, it will be a copy of your consciousness. It won't be you. You will still die.

EDIT:

With regards to the likelihood of creating machines that can even simulate human consciousness (let alone execute a copy of one, which is its own challenge), I don't think it's likely until we've cracked quantum computing. I buy the proposal that our brains are quantum computers, and I have begun to think that they cannot be accurately simulated on current hardware.

This is something I don't think many people get. The best illustration of this is in an episode of a scifi anthology series, The Outer Limits maybe, where aliens gave humanity teleportation technology to allow us to cross the vast distances in space easily. What the public was never told is that the device isn't true teleportation. It didn't transport anyone anywhere. What it did was make an exact copy of a person at the other end. The original was killed and the copy allowed to go on oblivious to the fact that they are a copy. We have no idea what consciousness is so we have no idea if it can even be moved around from ody to body let alone replicated.

I've always felt "true teleportation" is beyond possible, but that this is what could eventually be achievable.. woulnd't you die the instant your body dissembled and then you'd need to be reanimated upon assembly at the other end? at least that has been my line of thinking and answer whenever anyone wished we could just teleport somewhere while traveling..

It all depends on what is actually animating the meat we call our bodies. Is it just a program running in our wetware or is religion on to something and we are animated by something non-physical? Teleportation of sentient beings brings up all kinds of very interesting ideas and debates. Is there more to us than what we can see and quantify with our present level of technology? We've been asking this question almost since the beginning.

The singularity will happen. It's not an if, it's a when. The only thing that could prevent it is our own destruction.

That said, the whole "it's really just a copy" leads to many interesting ethical, moral, and philosophical questions. The whole "is there a soul" and "what happens to it if you copy your consciousness into a machine?" being the most obvious from a metaphysical standpoint. From there, you also have questions about the morality of only some people having access to the technology (as was mentioned in the article), and the practical matters of if everyone did.

I'm more curious about whether or not I'll see it in my lifetime.

There's also the question of whether trying to anticipate it is in any way useful. Sure, it may happen. Hell, it may even happen on Ray Kurtzweil's crazy accelerated timescale in the next couple of generations, but I simply don't see any point in speculating overmuch on it until it's much much closer. After all, we spent a lot of mindspace in the early to mid 20th century speculating on the future and how much of that ended up being accurate? Spending $150 billion on what's essentially a futurist's masturbatory fantasy just seems ridiculous, even if the world's current economic woes weren't an issue.

Keep the speculation to our think tanks and Science Fiction writers. More money isn't going to yield us any better answers on this.

That said, I am intensely curious about the future of computing once we reach physical size limits and are forced to move away from traditional CMOS architectures en masse in a decade or two. I don't expect AI, but it will be interesting to see what new computing paradigms await us in the near-ish future. Not at glamorous as the Singularity, but still pretty cool, I think.

I do not know if the 'singularity' as presented in this article will ever come to pass. I think you'd first have to define consciousness. I can tell you that significant research is being done on the biological extension of human longevity with similar implications. See the work of Aubrey de Grey and the Sens Institute. For him, the question isn't if it will happen in the next 100 years, it's if it will happen in the next 20.

It's worth watching if you have an hour to spare and can get past his crazy beard. He's well-respected and well-funded, but he's also one of those guys where maybe his quirky recluse-like appearance could be getting in the way of the information.

[The singularity] could be the best or worst thing ever to happen to life as we know it, so if there's even a one percent chance that there'll be a singularity in our lifetime, I think a reasonable precaution would be to spend at least one percent of our GDP studying the issue and deciding what to do about it. Yet we largely ignore it, and are curiously complacent about life as we know it getting transformed. What we should be worried about is that we're not worried.

Ok, this is a pet peeve of mine... using 1% just because it sounds like a small number.

How did he arrive at a .01 chance of it happening in our lifetime? That's actually pretty high. Why not .001 or .005?

And why does a .01 probability equate to spending 1% of our economic output?

I don't buy these arguments that uploading won't work because it's akin to copying a file rather than moving the original. Think about what happens each night when you go to sleep and wake the next morning. If, while you were sleeping, I "switched" your entire body & brain for an exact replica - would you notice anything different in the morning ? My guess is not... the physical substrate is the same, all your memories are intact - why would you feel any different ?

Starting life in a simulation would be simply like waking up in the real world. The "clone" would feel and behave exactly the same as you do. And if you happen to create 2 or more instances of yourself, that's OK too - no logical inconsistency there.

Paul Egan wrote a fantastic book about these issues, "Permutation City" - I highly recommend it.

I think the major misconception about "the singularity" is that of a Big Bang event, where the New York Times will write: "The Singularity happened tonight, got it!"

It's very subjective, what you might call a Singularity at all. A proper definition is, that a S. is the moment humanity enters transhumanism. Transhumanism is a future species/lifestyle which cannot be considered human anymore.

Transhumanism is the world we won't have sex in anymore. Is it worth 150B$/y to prevent that - definitely!

Reading the paragraph about the potential involvement of the EU and the possibility that China and other states could contribute at similar levels made me wonder about organization and control in a project like this. Then when I got to Bruce Sterling quoting "there's no there there", it clicked: We've already had an expensive singularity experiment, since October 1945. It's called the United Nations.

1) Deus Ex pc game, where the main antagonist basically merged with a machine, had universal constructors, and could basically live forever, make whatever he wanted, do whatever he wanted, without needing anyone else ... hence what's the point of keeping humans around. (of course, JC Denton stopped his diaboloical plan, but still... scary).

2) That episode of Star Trek where Q takes Picard (?) to the Q Continuum, and it's represented by a bunch of bored people sitting at a shack on a dusty road. They've learned everything, done everthing, live forever, are all-powerful, there's nothing more for them to do ... so they don't do anything. Doesn't sound like much of an "existence".

1) Deus Ex pc game, where the main antagonist basically merged with a machine, had universal constructors, and could basically live forever, make whatever he wanted, do whatever he wanted, without needing anyone else ... hence what's the point of keeping humans around. (of course, JC Denton stopped his diaboloical plan, but still... scary).

2) That episode of Star Trek where Q takes Picard (?) to the Q Continuum, and it's represented by a bunch of bored people sitting at a shack on a dusty road. They've learned everything, done everthing, live forever, are all-powerful, there's nothing more for them to do ... so they don't do anything. Doesn't sound like much of an "existence".

You are right if you are talking about humans. The Q weren't human. I think it's funny that most aliens in SciFi are just funny looking humans. Anyway, what you described sounds a lot like the description of Heaven I was given as a kid in Sunday School. I remember thinking, "Heaven doesn't sound all that great to me." I still don't get why Christians would want to go to a place of eternal boredom.

Reading the paragraph about the potential involvement of the EU and the possibility that China and other states could contribute at similar levels made me wonder about organization and control in a project like this. Then when I got to Bruce Sterling quoting "there's no there there", it clicked: We've already had an expensive singularity experiment, since October 1945. It's called the United Nations.

The UN was more of a bankers' experiment to create a unified, good-old-boy's club for global business dealings instead of a singularization. I guess you could see it as a singularization of business...but that's just globalization.

1) Deus Ex pc game, where the main antagonist basically merged with a machine, had universal constructors, and could basically live forever, make whatever he wanted, do whatever he wanted, without needing anyone else ... hence what's the point of keeping humans around. (of course, JC Denton stopped his diaboloical plan, but still... scary).

2) That episode of Star Trek where Q takes Picard (?) to the Q Continuum, and it's represented by a bunch of bored people sitting at a shack on a dusty road. They've learned everything, done everthing, live forever, are all-powerful, there's nothing more for them to do ... so they don't do anything. Doesn't sound like much of an "existence".

You are right if you are talking about humans. The Q weren't human. I think it's funny that most aliens in SciFi are just funny looking humans. Anyway, what you described sounds a lot like the description of Heaven I was given as a kid in Sunday School. I remember thinking, "Heaven doesn't sound all that great to me." I still don't get why Christians would want to go to a place of eternal boredom.

Yeah, I think Jim Jefferies does a bit on Heaven and living forever. Says that as humans, we get bored with the same thing over and over, even if it's great. Plus, if you snort blow off hookers' boobs, its sinful, so obviously you wouldnt' be allowed to do that in Heaven. So, wouldn't you rather go to Hell...where you could sin with folks like you and have a big party and enjoy yourself?